General Updates: Girls Club Sleepover, Wind Turbines and Observations

Greetings again from an increasingly hot and dry Gambia! It has been awhile since I have updated everyone about my work and general goings on in village so I will do my best to give a general overview of what I have been up to for the past couple of months in my work life without being to boring.

Girls Club:
This past weekend, a fellow PCV, Rachel, and I organized a sleepover extravaganza for our Girls Clubs at my school. We has about 60 girls come for a workshop on girls empowerment, with sessions on adjusting to senior secondary school, setting goals, career planning, appropriate relationships and supporting each other and being a good friend. At night we also had a big campfire and I convinced some of my rasta/bumster friends from Barra (the ferry crossing from Banjul town) to come up and drum. So everybody got the chance to dance and sing and wear fancy clothes, eat good food and also learn, meet new friends and hopefully be empowered. As I spend more time in village and working with the girls and also just interacting, I am finding that a majority of my time and energy is spent being somewhat of a gender activist. It is something I feel strongly about and think is really needed here so I am enjoying it even though it comes with a luandry list of annoyances and problems. Those who know me well know that I am noting if not outspoken about my opinions, which can be a fault or a strength at any given moment, so it is hard for me to stand by and listen or watch blatant discrimination based on sex without saying something or trying to provoke thought. I definitly try to do so in a culturally sensitive way and try to just pose questions or scenerios to get people thinking in a different way. There is definilty a women's rights movement going on here but it's power is largly confined to the city. I am lucky to know and be friends with some awesomely empowered Gambian women (the two I am closest to being my host sister Ansel - who operates her own business and owns property all while being illiterate and Haddy Choi - my counterpart for Girls Club and a Maths/Science teacher which is still very rare) so they give me the hope that these girls lives can be different then their mothers lives of endless farming, cooking, cleaning and birthing without any say in the matter.

Computer Lab:
Work with the computer lab has been at a virtual stand still for the past couple months and I didn't realize how long it had been until I went in there to find the place incased in dust when by some untimly will of Allah the school bought fuel. Interestingly, Allah's timing happened to conincide with the delivery of a VCR and DVD player the volunteer before me secured for the school for educational and income generation purposes (think outdoor movies with 500 people gathered around a 19' screen, charge a couple dalasi per head and it comes out to a nice profit for the school). So anyway, I have been unable to do anything with the computer lab because the school can never afford or is never willing to buy fuel to operate the generator. And I refuse to buy fuel on principal, plus it is expensive and our generator is about the opposite of efficient. So despite all these frustrations, I still have hope for the computer lab and have been working on the solar grant, which is finally finished and ready to be stamped and sent. We recently had a British ex-pat visitor to the school who came to give us an estimate on a wind turbine to provide alternative power (as opposed to solar power) and he made it seem like a pretty feasible option since Njongon is so close to the coast and is windy throughout the year. The estimate he gave us also has the total cost working out to less then that of a solar power system, plus this guy lives in Gambia and is the friend of a teacher so he volunteered to help us with the installation and maintence. In light of that visit, I need to edit the grant a bit to include the wind power option. Inshalla (God willing), I will get the grant written and delivered before I leave for Ghana on Friday.

Library:
The library is going well, nothing to drastically different or exciting to report on here. Just endless amounts of encouragment and reminders to the Librarian, my counterpart, Gasu to check in books properly and make sure things are left orderly; books stacked or on shelfs and chairs pushed in at the end of the day. I also am still doing the read alouds for grades 2, 3 and 4 when they come to library class with the goal of having them hear correct English spoken and learn to appreciate books and how they are to be read. Its going well but in the beginning it kind of backfired. After I read them the story I told them to go ahead and look at the books for the rest of the period. More then one child proceeded to open a book and hold it up to the side and present the pictures to those around here, I guess thinking that is how it was done or just playing an innocent game of imitate the teacher. It was cute, but they have since caught on a bit more about how books are to be read. They love the pictures, reading is a bit tough though because they can only read by memorization and have no idea how to go about sounding words out. I am going to try and start doing some phonics training with the teachers at the school in the hopes of lessening that problem but it is really deep seeded so I don't know how sucessful I will be. Can't hurt to try though! We only have one term of school left for the year, and throughout the year a good number of books have been lost to the homes of grade 3 students who thought they were clever by trying to return a book they never borrowed in the first place or have been loved a little to much and thus destroyed. The majority of the books are pretty old and beat up when we get them so its not suprising that they fall apart. I am hoping to get some books from the Book Drive Mama Spotts and Linds and Lauren have headed up back home to replenish. This summer I am hoping to spruce up the library a bit and do some painting of teaching aids on the walls to make it a more pleasant place and more educational.

Stay Green Foundation:
I haven't been to the office in a couple of weeks because of schedulng conflicts but I hope to get back soon. I hooked the NGO up with some Enviornment volunteers who are in a better and more qualified position to help them with their extension work in villages but I hope to still go once a week to continue training the secrataties in computer applications and to help Baboucarr (the Director) with organizational and manegerial stuff.

Teacher Training:
I continue to do informal teacher training at my school, St. Michael's and at a nearby school, Mbollet Ba. Recently I have been doing follow up on the workshop material I presented at the begining of term on integrating games and activities into the classroom. I have been doing observations of teachers in the classroom to see if they are actually implemented some of the ideas. So far nobody, except for one grade 2 teacher who had the kids act out an awesome drama based on an Englsih story they read, have really shown that they are implementing anything. I am only half way through the teachers though so I am holding out hope for the upper grades. It is still good to see how they are teaching and make some one on one suggestions. I observed one teacher and had to sit through a lesson where she was trying to get the kids to do subtration with borrowing. She was calling kids up to the board to solve, which is fine, but then when a student got it wrong she had them move to the side and another student came up to try. When a student finally got it right, the reward was that he or she got to beat the students who got it wrong three time on the hand with a switch! It was rather hard to sit through and hard to get through to the teacher that is not an okay classroom management technique and that perhaps maybe the students are clamoring to participate just so they can beat each other on the hand. That was by far one of the worst classroom displays I have seen, and the majority are not nearly that exciting or horrifying, but are rather just boring. Thankfully there are those grade 2 teachers that come up with a great activity for their students that is fun and educational all at the same time, completly on their own. We just started our spring break, but when third term gets going I want to try and implement a quiz competition of sorts to encourage students to study in a positive way. Hopefully, it will work out as planned, fingers crossed.


So that is the big work picture over the last couple of months. But enough thinking about work for now, I am officially on vacation and am heading for 10 days in Ghana on Friday!